company:verizon

  • Danger de la 5G : Des centaines de scientifiques respectés tirent la sonnette d’alarme au sujet des effets sur la santé alors que les réseaux 5G se déploient à l’échelle nationale
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/sciencess/16043-danger-de-la-5g-des-centaines-de-scientifiques-respectes-tirent-la-

    Update 20.05.2019 : 5G : des Italiens assurent être victimes de maux de tête (LeSoir.be)

    Même si de nombreux membres de la communauté scientifique mettent en garde contre les effets potentiels de la technologie 5G sur la santé de la population en général, Verizon et AT&T commencent à installer leurs réseaux 5G dans les grandes villes de tout le pays. Aujourd’hui, le nombre total de téléphones cellulaires dépasse le nombre total de la population mondiale, et les grandes compagnies de téléphonie cellulaire gagne une somme folle d’argent en fournissant un service à tous ces téléphones. Et maintenant que la prochaine génération de technologie de téléphonie cellulaire est arrivée, des millions d’utilisateurs de téléphones cellulaires s’attendent à de meilleures connexions et à des (...)

    #En_vedette #Actualités_scientifiques #Sciences

  • Marissa Mayer Interview : How a Revenue Guarantee Almost Killed #google
    https://hackernoon.com/marissa-mayer-on-career-growth-and-how-a-revenue-guarantee-almost-killed

    Interview by Harj TaggarI remember when we made a huge revenue guarantee to AOL to get the account. We did a best-case scenario projection, a middle of the road projection, and a worst-case scenario projection. Worst-case scenario and middle of the road had us going out of business with the contract. The best-case scenario had us breaking even.Marissa Mayer was one of the earliest employees at Google and helped to shape both Gmail and Google Maps. Mayer became the CEO of Yahoo in 2012, a position she held until 2017 when Yahoo was acquired by Verizon for $4.48 billion. In 2018, she co-founded Lumi Labs, a startup incubator in Palo Alto focusing on consumer media and AI. Marissa Mayer recently sat down with Triplebyte’s CEO, Harj Taggar, to discuss her career in #tech and the advice she (...)

    #careers #marissa-mayer-interview #software-development

  • #CBP terminates controversial $297 million #Accenture contract amid continued staffing struggles

    #Customs_and_Border_Protection on Thursday ended its controversial $297 million hiring contract with Accenture, according to two senior DHS officials and an Accenture representative.
    As of December, when CBP terminated part of its contract, the company had only completed processing 58 applicants and only 22 had made it onto the payroll about a year after the company was hired.
    At the time, the 3,500 applicants that remained in the Accenture hiring pipeline were transferred to CBP’s own hiring center to complete the process.

    CBP cut ties with Accenture on processing applicants a few months ago, it retained some services, including marketing, advertising and applicant support.
    This week, the entire contract was terminated for “convenience,” government speak for agreeing to part ways without placing blame on Accenture.
    While government hiring is “slow and onerous, it’s also part of being in the government” and that’s “something we have to accept and deal with as we go forward,” said one of the officials.
    For its efforts, CBP paid Accenture around $19 million in start-up costs, and around $2 million for 58 people who got job offers, according to the officials.
    Over the last couple of months, CBP explored how to modify the contract, but ultimately decided to completely stop work and return any remaining funds to taxpayers.
    But it’s unclear how much money, if any, that will be.

    In addition, to the funds already paid to Accenture, CBP has around $39 million left to “settle and close the books” with the company, an amount which has yet to be determined.
    In November 2017, CBP awarded Accenture the contract to help meet the hiring demands of an executive order on border security that President Donald Trump signed during his first week in office. The administration directed CBP to hire an additional 7,500 agents and officers on top of its current hiring goals.
    “We were in a situation where we needed to try something new” and “break the cycle of going backwards,” said a DHS official about why the agency started the contract.

    Meanwhile, hiring remains difficult for the agency amid a surge of migrants at the southern border that is stretching CBP resources thin.
    It “continues to be a very challenging environment,” said one official about hiring efforts this year.

    In fact, one of the reasons that CBP didn’t need Accenture to process applicants, is because the agency didn’t receive as many applications as it initially planned for.
    The agency has been focused on beating attrition and has been able to recently “beat it by a modest amount,” said the official. “Ultimately we would like to beat it by a heck of a lot, but we’re not there yet.”

    https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/05/politics/cbp-terminate-hiring-contract-accenture/index.html
    #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #USA #Ests-Unis #complexe_militaro-industriel #business

    • Border Profiteers

      On a recent sunny spring afternoon in Texas, a couple hundred Border Patrol agents, Homeland Security officials, and salespeople from a wide array of defense and security contractors gathered at the Bandera Gun Club about an hour northwest of San Antonio to eat barbecue and shoot each other’s guns. The techies wore flip-flops; the veterans wore combat boots. Everyone had a good time. They were letting loose, having spent the last forty-eight hours cooped up in suits and ties back at San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonzalez convention center, mingling and schmoozing, hawking their wares, and listening to immigration officials rail about how those serving in enforcement agencies are not, under any circumstances, Nazis.

      These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 #Border_Security_Expo —essentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expo’s marketing materials, to “identify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.” The previous two days of panels, speeches, and presentations had been informative, a major in the Argentine Special Forces told me at the gun range, but boring. He was glad to be outside, where handguns popped and automatic rifles spat around us. I emptied a pistol into a target while a man in a Three Percenter militia baseball hat told me that I was a “natural-born killer.” A drone buzzed overhead until, in a demonstration of a company’s new anti-drone technology, a device that looked like a rocket launcher and fired a sort of exploding net took it down. “This is music to me,” the Argentine major said.

      Perhaps it’s not surprising the Border Security Expo attendees were so eager to blow off steam. This year’s event found many of them in a defensive posture, given the waves of bad press they’d endured since President Trump’s inauguration, and especially since the disastrous implementation of his family separation policy, officially announced by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April of 2018, before being rescinded by Trump two-and-a-half months later. Throughout the Expo, in public events and in background roundtable conversations with reporters, officials from the various component parts of the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a series of carefully rehearsed talking points: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) need more money, personnel, and technology; taking migrants to hospitals distracts CBP officers from their real mission; and the 1997 Flores court settlement, which prohibits immigration enforcement agencies from detaining migrant families with children for more than twenty days, is undermining the very sovereignty of the United States. “We want a secure border, we want an immigration system that has integrity,” Ronald Vitiello, then–acting head of ICE, said in a keynote address to the hundreds of people gathered in San Antonio. “We have a generous immigration system in this country, but it has to have integrity in order for us to continue to be so generous.”

      More of a technocrat than his thuggish predecessor Thomas Homan, Vitiello also spoke at length about using the “dark web” to take down smugglers and the importance of having the most up-to-date data-management technology. But he spoke most adamantly about needing “a fix” for the Flores settlement. “If you prosecute crimes and you give people consequences, you get less of it,” he said. “With Flores, there’s no consequence, and everybody knows that,” a senior ICE official echoed to reporters during a background conversation immediately following Vitiello’s keynote remarks. “That’s why you’re seeing so many family units. We cannot apply a consequence to a family unit, because we have to release them.”

      Meanwhile, around 550 miles to the west, in El Paso, hundreds of migrants, including children and families, were being held by CBP under a bridge, reportedly forced to sleep on the ground, with inadequate medical attention. “They treated us like we are animals,” one Honduran man told Texas Monthly. “I felt what they were trying to do was to hurt us psychologically, so we would understand that this is a lesson we were being taught, that we shouldn’t have crossed.” Less than a week after the holding pen beneath the bridge closed, Vitiello’s nomination to run ICE would be pulled amid a spate of firings across DHS; President Trump wanted to go “in a tougher direction.”

      Family Values

      On the second day of the Border Security Expo, in a speech over catered lunch, Scott Luck, deputy chief of Customs and Border Protection and a career Border Patrol agent, lamented that the influx of children and families at the border meant that resources were being diverted from traditional enforcement practices. “Every day, about 150 agents spend their shifts at hospitals and medical facilities with illegal aliens receiving treatment,” he said. “The annual salary cost for agents on hospital watch is more than $11.5 million. Budget analysts estimate that 13 percent of our operational budget—the budget that we use to buy equipment, to buy vehicles for our men and women—is now used for transportation, medical expenses, diapers, food, and other necessities to care for illegal aliens in Border Patrol custody.”

      As far as Luck was concerned, every dollar spent on food and diapers is one not spent on drones and weapons, and every hour an agent spends guarding a migrant in a hospital is an hour they don’t spend on the border. “It’s not what they signed up for. The mission they signed up for is to protect the United States border, to protect the communities in which they live and serve,” he told reporters after his speech. “The influx, the volume, the clutter that this creates is frustrating.” Vitiello applied an Orwellian inversion: “We’re not helping them as fast as we want to,” he said of migrant families apprehended at the border.

      Even when discussing the intimate needs of detained migrant families, the language border officials used to describe their remit throughout the Expo was explicitly militaristic: achieving “operational control,” Luck said, requires “impedance and denial” and “situational awareness.” He referred to technology as a “vital force multiplier.” He at least stopped short of endorsing the president’s framing that what is happening on the border constitutes an invasion, instead describing it as a “deluge.”

      According to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, the U.S. immigrant population has continued to grow—although at a slower rate than it did before the 2007 recession, and undocumented people appear to make up a smaller proportion of the overall population. Regardless, in fiscal year 2018, both ICE and CBP stepped up their enforcement activities, arresting, apprehending, and deporting people at significantly higher rates than the previous year. More than three times as many family members were apprehended at the border last year than in 2017, the Pew Research Center reports, and in the first six months of FY 2019 alone there were 189,584 apprehensions of “family units”: more than half of all apprehensions at the border during that time, and more than the full-year total of apprehended families for any other year on record. While the overall numbers have not yet begun to approach those of the 1980s and 1990s, when apprehensions regularly exceeded one million per year, the demographics of who is arriving at the United States southern border are changing: fewer single men from Mexico and more children and families from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—in other words, an ever-wider range of desperate victims of drug gangs and American policies that have long supported corrupt regimes.

      This change has presented people like Luck with problems they insist are merely logistical: aging Border Patrol stations, he told us at the Expo, “are not luxurious in any way, and they were never intended to handle families and children.” The solution, according to Vitiello, is “continued capital investment” in those facilities, as well as the cars and trucks necessary to patrol the border region and transport those apprehended from CBP custody to ICE detention centers, the IT necessary to sift through vast amounts of data accumulated through untold surveillance methods, and all of “the systems by which we do our work.”

      Neither Vitiello nor Luck would consider whether those systems—wherein thousands of children, ostensibly under the federal government’s care, have been sexually abused and five, from December through May of this year, have died—ought to be questioned. Both laughed off calls from migrant justice organizers, activists, and politicians to abolish ICE. “The concept of the Department of Homeland Security—and ICE as an agency within it—was designed for us to learn the lessons from 9/11,” Vitiello said. “Those needs still exist in this society. We’re gonna do our part.” DHS officials have even considered holding migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the New York Times, where a new $23 million “contingency mass migration complex” is being built. The complex, which is to be completed by the end of the year, will have a capacity of thirteen thousand.

      Violence is the Point

      The existence of ICE may be a consequence of 9/11, but the first sections of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border—originally to contain livestock—went up in 1909 through 1911. In 1945, in response to a shift in border crossings from Texas to California, the U.S. Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service recycled fencing wire and posts from internment camps in Crystal City, Texas, where more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans had been imprisoned during World War II. “Although the INS could not erect a continuous line of fence along the border, they hoped that strategic placement of the fence would ‘compel persons seeking to enter the United States illegally to attempt to go around the ends of the fence,’” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, quoting from government documents, writes in Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. “What lay at the end of the fences and canals were desert lands and mountains extremely dangerous to cross without guidance or sufficient water. The fences, therefore, discouraged illegal immigration by exposing undocumented border crossers to the dangers of daytime dehydration and nighttime hypothermia.”

      Apprehension and deportation tactics continued to escalate in the years following World War II—including Operation Wetback, the infamous (and heavily propagandized) mass-deportation campaign of 1954—but the modern, militarized border era was greatly boosted by Bill Clinton. It was during Clinton’s first administration that Border Patrol released its “Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond,” which introduced the idea of “prevention through deterrence,” a theory of border policing that built on the logic of the original wall and hinges upon increasing the “cost” of migration “to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.” With the Strategic Plan, the agency was requesting more money, officers, and equipment in order to “enhance national security and safeguard our immigration heritage.”

      The plan also noted that “a strong interior enforcement posture works well for border control,” and in 1996, amid a flurry of legislation targeting people of color and the poor, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which empowered the federal government to deport more people more quickly and made it nearly impossible for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status. “Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement,” the sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen A. Pren wrote in 2012. “Afterward these activities rose to levels not seen since the deportation campaigns of the Great Depression.” With the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2002, immigration was further securitized and criminalized, paving the way for an explosion in border policing technology that has further aligned the state with the defense and security industry. And at least one of Border Patrol’s “key assumptions,” explicitly stated in the 1994 strategy document, has borne out: “Violence will increase as effects of strategy are felt.”

      What this phrasing obscures, however, is that violence is the border strategy. In practice, what “prevention through deterrence” has meant is forcing migrants to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert, putting already vulnerable people at even greater risk. Closing urban points of entry, for example, or making asylum-seekers wait indefinitely in Mexico while their claims are processed, pushes migrants into remote areas where there is a higher likelihood they will suffer injury and death, as in the case of seven-year-old Jakil Caal Maquin, who died of dehydration and shock after being taken into CBP custody in December. (A spokesperson for CBP, in an email response, deflected questions about whether the agency considers children dying in its custody a deterrent.) Maquin is one of many thousands who have died attempting to cross into the United States: the most conservative estimate comes from CBP itself, which has recovered the remains of 7,505 people from its southwest border sectors between 1998 and 2018. This figure accounts for neither those who die on the Mexican side of the border, nor those whose bodies remain lost to the desert.

      Draconian immigration policing causes migrants to resort to smugglers and traffickers, creating the conditions for their exploitation by cartels and other violent actors and increasing the likelihood that they will be kidnapped, coerced, or extorted. As a result, some migrants have sought the safety of collective action in the form of the “caravan” or “exodus,” which has then led the U.S. media and immigration enforcement agencies to justify further militarization of the border. Indeed, in his keynote address at the Expo, Luck described “the emerging prevalence of large groups of one hundred people or more” as “troubling and especially dangerous.” Later, a sales representative for the gun manufacturer Glock very confidently explained to me that this was because agents of al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, were embedded with the caravans.

      Branding the Border

      Unsurprisingly, caravans came up frequently at the Border Security Expo. (An ICE spokesperson would later decline to explain what specific threat they pose to national security, instead citing general statistics about the terrorist watchlist, “special interest aliens,” and “suspicious travel patterns.”) During his own keynote speech, Vitiello described how ICE, and specifically its subcomponent Homeland Security Investigations, had deployed surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques to monitor the progress of caravans toward the border. “When these caravans have come, we’ve had trained, vetted individuals on the ground in those countries reporting in real time what they were seeing: who the organizers were, how they were being funded,” he said, before going on an astonishing tangent:

      That’s the kind of capability that also does amazing things to protecting brands, property rights, economic security. Think about it. If you start a company, introduce a product that’s innovative, there are people in the world who can take that, deconstruct it, and create their own version of it and sell it as yours. All the sweat that went into whatever that product was, to build your brand, they’ll take it away and slap it on some substandard product. It’s not good for consumers, it’s not good for public safety, and it’s certainly an economic drain on the country. That’s part of the mission.

      That the then–acting director of ICE, the germ-cell of fascism in the bourgeois American state, would admit that an important part of his agency’s mission is the protection of private property is a testament to the Trump administration’s commitment to saying the quiet part out loud.

      In fact, brands and private industry had pride of place at the Border Security Expo. A memorial ceremony for men and women of Border Patrol who have been killed in the line of duty was sponsored by Sava Solutions, an IT firm that has been awarded at least $482 million in federal contracts since 2008. Sava, whose president spent twenty-four years with the DEA and whose director of business development spent twenty with the FBI, was just one of the scores of firms in attendance at the Expo, each hoping to persuade the bureaucrats in charge of acquiring new gear for border security agencies that their drones, their facial recognition technology, their “smart” fences were the best of the bunch. Corporate sponsors included familiar names like Verizon and Motorola, and other less well-known ones, like Elbit Systems of America, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest private defense contractor, as well as a handful of IT firms with aggressive slogans like “Ever Vigilant” (CACI), “Securing the Future” (ManTech), and “Securing Your Tomorrow” (Unisys).

      The presence of these firms—and indeed the very existence of the Expo—underscores an important truth that anyone attempting to understand immigration politics must reckon with: border security is big business. The “homeland security and emergency management market,” driven by “increasing terrorist threats and biohazard attacks and occurrence of unpredictable natural disasters,” is projected to grow to more than $742 billion by 2023 from $557 billion in 2018, one financial analysis has found. In the coming decades, as more people are displaced by climate catastrophe and economic crises—estimates vary between 150 million and 1 billion by 2050—the industry dedicated to policing the vulnerable stands to profit enormously. By 2013, the United States was already spending more on federal immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, including the FBI and DEA; ICE’s budget has doubled since its inception in 2003, while CBP’s has nearly tripled. Between 1993 and 2018, the number of Border Patrol agents grew from 4,139 to 19,555. And year after year, Democrats and Republicans alike have been happy to fuel an ever more high-tech deportation machine. “Congress has given us a lot of money in technology,” Luck told reporters after his keynote speech. “They’ve given us over what we’ve asked for in technology!”

      “As all of this rhetoric around security has increased, so has the impetus to give them more weapons and more tools and more gadgets,” Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign organizer with Mijente, a national network of migrant justice activists, told me. “That’s also where the profiteering comes in.” She continued: “Industries understand what’s good for business and adapt themselves to what they see is happening. If they see an administration coming into power that is pro-militarization, anti-immigrant, pro-police, anti-communities of color, then that’s going to shape where they put their money.”

      By way of example, Gonzalez pointed to Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $1.25 million supporting Trump’s 2016 election campaign and followed that up last year by donating $1 million to the Club for Growth—a far-right libertarian organization founded by Heritage Foundation fellow and one-time Federal Reserve Board prospect Stephen Moore—as well as about $350,000 to the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups. ICE has awarded Palantir, the $20 billion surveillance firm founded by Thiel, several contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to manage its data streams—a partnership the agency considers “mission critical,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Palantir, in turn, runs on Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service provided by the world’s most valuable public company, which is itself a key contractor in managing the Department of Homeland Security’s $6.8 billion IT portfolio.

      Meanwhile, former DHS secretary John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff when the administration enacted its “zero-tolerance” border policy, has joined the board of Caliburn International—parent organization of the only for-profit company operating shelters for migrant children. “Border enforcement and immigration policy,” Caliburn reported in an SEC filing last year, “is driving significant growth.” As Harsha Walia writes in Undoing Border Imperialism, “the state and capitalism are again in mutual alliance.”

      Triumph of the Techno-Nativists

      At one point during the Expo, between speeches, I stopped by a booth for Network Integrity Systems, a security firm that had set up a demonstration of its Sentinel™ Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. A sales representative stuck out his hand and introduced himself, eager to explain how his employer’s fiber optic motion sensors could be used at the border, or—he paused to correct himself—“any kind of perimeter.” He invited me to step inside the space that his coworkers had built, starting to say “cage” but then correcting himself, again, to say “small enclosure.” (It was literally a cage.) If I could get out, climbing over the fencing, without triggering the alarm, I would win a $500 Amazon gift card. I did not succeed.

      Overwhelmingly, the vendors in attendance at the Expo were there to promote this kind of technology: not concrete and steel, but motion sensors, high-powered cameras, and drones. Customs and Border Patrol’s chief operating officer John Sanders—whose biography on the CBP website describes him as a “seasoned entrepreneur and innovator” who has “served on the Board of Directors for several leading providers of contraband detection, geospatial intelligence, and data analytics solutions”—concluded his address by bestowing on CBP the highest compliment he could muster: declaring the agency comparable “to any start-up.” Rhetoric like Sanders’s, ubiquitous at the Expo, renders the border both bureaucratic and boring: a problem to be solved with some algorithmic mixture of brutality and Big Data. The future of border security, as shaped by the material interests that benefit from border securitization, is not a wall of the sort imagined by President Trump, but a “smart” wall.

      High-ranking Democrats—leaders in the second party of capital—and Republicans from the border region have championed this compromise. During the 2018-2019 government shutdown, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters that Democrats would appropriate $5.7 billion for “border security,” so long as that did not include a wall of Trump’s description. “Walls are primitive. What we need to do is have border security,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said in January. He later expanded to CNN: “I’ve said that we ought to have a smart wall. I defined that as a wall using drones to make it too high to get over, using x-ray equipment to make it too wide to get around, and using scanners to go deep enough not to be able to tunnel under it. To me, that would be a smart thing to do.”

      Even the social democratic vision of Senator Bernie Sanders stops short at the border. “If you open the borders, my God, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world,” he told Iowa voters in early April, “and I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point.” Over a week later, during a Fox News town hall with Pennsylvania voters, he recommitted: “We need border security. Of course we do. Who argues with that? That goes without saying.”

      To the extent that Trump’s rhetoric, his administration’s immigration policies, and the enforcement agencies’ practices have made the “border crisis” more visible than ever before, they’ve done so on terms that most Democrats and liberals fundamentally agree with: immigration must be controlled and policed; the border must be enforced. One need look no further than the high priest of sensible centrism, Thomas Friedman, whose major complaint about Trump’s immigration politics is that he is “wasting” the crisis—an allusion to Rahm Emanuel’s now-clichéd remark that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” (Frequently stripped of context, it is worth remembering that Emanuel made this comment in the throes of the 2008 financial meltdown, at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, shortly following President Obama’s election.) “Regarding the border, the right place for Democrats to be is for a high wall with a big gate,” Friedman wrote in November of 2018. A few months later, a tour led by Border Patrol agents of the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego left Friedman “more certain than ever that we have a real immigration crisis and that the solution is a high wall with a big gate—but a smart gate.”

      As reasonable as this might sound to anxious New York Times readers looking for what passes as humanitarian thinking in James Bennet’s opinion pages, the horror of Friedman’s logic eventually reveals itself when he considers who might pass through the big, smart gate in the high, high wall: “those who deserve asylum” and “a steady flow of legal, high-energy, and high-I.Q. immigrants.” Friedman’s tortured hypothetical shows us who he considers to be acceptable subjects of deportation and deprivation: the poor, the lazy, and the stupid. This is corporate-sponsored, state-sanctioned eugenics: the nativism of technocrats.

      The vision of a hermetically sealed border being sold, in different ways, by Trump and his allies, by Democrats, and by the Border Security Expo is in reality a selectively permeable one that strictly regulates the movement of migrant labor while allowing for the unimpeded flow of capital. Immigrants in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are caught between two factions of the capitalist class, each of which seek their immiseration: the citrus farmers, construction firms, and meat packing plants that benefit from an underclass of unorganized and impoverished workers, and the defense and security firms that keep them in a state of constant criminality and deportability.

      You could even argue that nobody in a position of power really wants a literal wall. Even before taking office, Trump himself knew he could only go so far. “We’re going to do a wall,” he said on the campaign trail in 2015. However: “We’re going to have a big, fat beautiful door on the wall.” In January 2019, speaking to the American Farm Bureau Association, Trump acknowledged the necessity of a mechanism allowing seasonal farmworkers from Mexico to cross the border, actually promising to loosen regulations on employers who rely on temporary migrant labor. “It’s going to be easier for them to get in than what they have to go through now,” he said, “I know a lot about the farming world.”

      At bottom, there is little material difference between this and what Friedman imagines to be the smarter, more humane approach. While establishment liberals would no doubt prefer that immigration enforcement be undertaken quietly, quickly, and efficiently, they have no categorical objection to the idea that noncitizens should enjoy fewer rights than citizens or be subject to different standards of due process (standards that are already applied in deeply inequitable fashion).

      As the smorgasbord of technologies and services so garishly on display at the Border Security Expo attests, maintaining the contradiction between citizens and noncitizens (or between the imperial core and the colonized periphery) requires an ever-expanding security apparatus, which itself becomes a source of ever-expanding profit. The border, shaped by centuries of bourgeois interests and the genocidal machinations of the settler-colonial nation-state, constantly generates fresh crises on which the immigration-industrial complex feeds. In other words, there is not a crisis at the border; the border is the crisis.

      CBP has recently allowed Anduril, a start-up founded by one of Peter Thiel’s mentees, Palmer Luckey, to begin testing its artificial intelligence-powered surveillance towers and drones in Texas and California. Sam Ecker, an Anduril engineer, expounded on the benefits of such technology at the Expo. “A tower doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t care about being in the middle of the desert or a river around the clock,” he told me. “We just let the computers do what they do best.”

      https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/border-profiteers-oconnor

  • How Libertarian theology and Trump are destroying the Internet — and America – Alternet.org
    https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/how-libertarian-theology-and-trump-are-destroying-the-internet-and-america

    With speeds up to 100 times faster than current 4G cellular data, 5G will make possible everything from driverless cars to cell-connected long-distance drones to precision remote surgery. The amount of data flowing through our cellular systems will explode, along with places it can be used and the uses to which it can be applied.

    Remote applications that are currently too difficult to wire for high-speed internet or won’t work well at 4G speeds will easily become remotely controlled, spreading the internet revolution to every device in the home, office, and even remote workplaces.

    Along with all this data will, inevitably, come hackers, both criminal and state-sponsored. The amount of data that it now takes a third of a year to harvest with 4G can be scooped up in a single day using 5G.

    Given that the U.S. government invented the internet (yes, Al Gore did co-author the legislation) and has a huge stake in its security, doesn’t it make sense that our government should provide, at least in framework and standards, for its security?

    But, no. Trump and Pence want to do to the FCC what they’ve done to the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the FDA, and to oversight of our banking systems.

    According to Trump and his billionaire libertarian owners, the safety and security of America is not the proper role of government. Not our air, our water, our public lands, or even our internet.

    “Just turn it all over to the billionaires,” they say. “What could possibly go wrong?”

    FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer, even went so far as to say that “the market, not government, is best positioned to drive innovation and leadership” with regard to internet security.

    Meanwhile, the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee—after looking at how 5G will blow open data operations across the country—wrote just three months ago that “the cybersecurity threat now poses an existential threat to the future of the nation.”

    #Cybersécurité #Libertariens #Idéologie_californienne #5G #Normalisation

  • The Biggest Threat to Free Speech No One Is Talking About
    https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-biggest-threat-to-free-speech-no-one-is-talking-about

    Since the repeal in June of Obama-era rules guaranteeing net neutrality, websites like Truthdig, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams and more risk being pushed into an internet slow lane that could severely hamper their readership, if not drive them out of business entirely. For Jeff Cohen, editor and co-founder of the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), it may be the most urgent threat to the First Amendment no one is talking about.

    “The biggest issue of freedom of the press is not that Trump is mean to reporters, as he was last week with CNN’s Jim Acosta and Yamiche Alcindor of “PBS NewsHour,” he tells Robert Scheer. “The biggest freedom-of-the-press issue is that Trump is working with Comcast and AT&T and Verizon to end net neutrality. … Ownership of the media and the ownership of the internet, the fact that these big internet providers are [a] few giant companies that also produce content—it’s very, very dangerous.”

    #neutralité_du_net #filtre #bulle #médias

  • Neutralité du Net : l’industrie télécom américaine attaque l’État du Vermont
    https://www.nextinpact.com/brief/neutralite-du-net---l-industrie-telecom-americaine-attaque-l-etat-du-ver

    Les législateurs du Vermont préparent un projet de loi excluant des marchés publics les entreprises qui ne respectent pas la neutralité du Net, rapporte Reuters. Les groupes sont connus : l’American Cable Association, la CTIA, la NCTA, la New England Cable & Telecommunications Associations et USTelecom. Ils représentent les mastodontes de l’industrie, dont AT&T, Comcast et Verizon. La plainte, déposée devant une cour du Vermont, argue que les États ne peuvent pas réguler indirectement (via (...)

    #Comcast #NCTA #Telecommunications_Industry_Association_(TIA) #USTelecom #Verizon #AT&T #neutralité (...)

    ##Telecommunications_Industry_Association__TIA_ ##AT&T ##neutralité ##procès

  • Fin de la neutralité du Net : YouTube, Netflix et Amazon Prime Video bridés
    https://abonnes.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2018/09/07/les-operateurs-americains-freinent-youtube-netflix-et-amazon-prime-v ?

    Aux Etats-Unis, la fin de la neutralité du Net, principe qui interdisait aux opérateurs de télécommunications de discriminer les flux Internet, et que le président Donald Trump a fait abroger en juin, se fait sentir.

    Ainsi, quatre de ces sociétés ont déjà commencé à brider le trafic des services les plus prisés par les internautes — Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, et surtout YouTube, la plate-forme de vidéos gratuites propriété de Google —, selon une recherche menée par l’université Northeastern et l’université du Massachusetts, et révélée par Bloomberg.

    Depuis longtemps, le rêve des opérateurs était de faire passer à la caisse ces grandes plates-formes très consommatrices de bande passante, ce qu’ils n’avaient pas réussi à faire jusqu’à présent. Ces mesures pourraient n’être qu’un premier pas avant une facturation en bonne et due forme.

    Pour mener leurs travaux, les chercheurs ont développé une application, baptisée « Wehe », capable de détecter quand et par qui les services mobiles sont ralentis. Elle a été téléchargée par 100 000 consommateurs ; 500 000 tests ont été menés sur 2 000 services dans 161 pays.
    La nécessité de « bien gérer le réseau »

    Dans le détail, AT&T et Verizon, les deux premiers opérateurs outre-Atlantique, ont discriminé le trafic des services vidéos à respectivement 8 398 et 11 100 reprises. Plus raisonnables, T-Mobile et Sprint s’en sont tenus à 3 900 et 339 ralentissements.

    En août, Verizon a même été surpris en train de brider les connexions des sapeurs-pompiers, qui se battaient contre le plus vaste incendie qu’ait connu la Californie.

    #Neutralité_internet

  • Oath’s new privacy policy allows it to scan your Yahoo and AOL mail for targeted advertising
    https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/14/17237864/oath-aol-yahoo-email-privacy-terms-scan-ads

    This month, Oath updated its privacy policies, which grants the company the right to scan your AOL and Yahoo email for the purposes of tailoring ads for users. Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2016, and brought AOL and Yahoo together under an unfortunately named brand : Oath. At the time, we noted that the merger, coupled with the passage of a bill allowing ISPs to share browsing data was something that the companies had worked towards for years : the ability to extract revenue from consumers (...)

    #AOL #Altaba/Yahoo ! #Oath #Yahoo_Mail #algorithme #terms #écoutes #publicité #reconnaissance

    ##Altaba/Yahoo_! ##publicité

  • Aux États-Unis, Amazon, Microsoft et Uber s’opposent à une loi pour la protection de la vie privée
    https://www.01net.com/actualites/aux-etats-unis-amazon-microsoft-et-uber-s-opposent-a-une-loi-pour-la-protecti

    La réplique californienne du RGPD ne convient pas à certaines entreprises de la Silicon Valley. Parmi les GAFAM, seul Apple ne s’est pas opposé au « Privacy Act ». Les autres disent s’inquiéter pour la prospérité de leurs activités. Depuis le 25 mai dernier, le RGPD est en application en Europe. Cette loi sur la protection de la vie privée force les entreprises à être transparentes sur les données qu’elles collectent, et à donner plus de choix à l’utilisateur. Aux États-Unis, la Californie travaille sur (...)

    #Google #Verizon #Microsoft #Amazon #Facebook #Uber #données #BigData #[fr]Règlement_Général_sur_la_Protection_des_Données_(RGPD)[en]General_Data_Protection_Regulation_(GDPR)[nl]General_Data_Protection_Regulation_(GDPR) #GAFAM (...)

    ##[fr]Règlement_Général_sur_la_Protection_des_Données__RGPD_[en]General_Data_Protection_Regulation__GDPR_[nl]General_Data_Protection_Regulation__GDPR_ ##lobbying

  • Surveillance : quel bilan tirer, cinq ans après le début des révélations d’Edward Snowden ?
    https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2018/06/05/surveillance-quel-bilan-tirer-cinq-ans-apres-le-debut-des-revelations-d-edwa

    Si la publication des documents secrets n’a pas mis un terme à la surveillance de masse, le bilan des révélations Snowden est loin d’être négligeable. Dans la nuit du 5 au 6 juin 2013, le monde découvre sur le site du quotidien britannique The Guardian un document classé secret issu de la National Security Agency (NSA) révélant que l’opérateur américain Verizon transmet à cette agence de renseignement des wagons entiers de données sur ses clients. Ce document stupéfie les observateurs : c’est la première (...)

    #GCHQ #Verizon #NSA #web #surveillance #données #PRISM #Safe_Harbor #cryptage

  • Géolocalisation : la sécurité pas une option pour les données personnelles
    http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/geolocalisation-la-securite-pas-une-option-pour-les-donnees-personnelles-39868

    LocationSmart recueille les données de localisation en temps réel de millions de clients de la téléphonie cellulaire grâce au concours des opérateurs américains. Problème : une faille de son site Web permet de gélocaliser une personne, sans son consentement. Une vulnérabilité dans le site Web d’une entreprise qui recueille les données de localisation en temps réel de millions de clients de la téléphonie en Amérique du Nord permet à quiconque de voir où se trouve une personne, et bien entendu sans le (...)

    #smartphone #géolocalisation #hacking #LocationSmart #AT&T #Sprint #T-Mobile #Verizon

    ##AT&T

  • A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/cell-phone-tracking-firm-exposed-millions-of-americans-real-time-locations

    The bug allowed one Carnegie Mellon researcher to track anyone’s cell phone in real time.

    A company that collects the real-time location data on millions of cell phone customers across North America had a bug in its website that allowed anyone to see where a person is located — without obtaining their consent. Earlier this week, we reported that four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you’ve probably never heard about before. The (...)

    #LocationSmart #T-Mobile #Verizon #Sprint #smartphone #géolocalisation #hacking #AT&T

    ##AT&T

  • Facebook Turned Our Economy Into a Spying Operation | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/our-economy-based-spying

    George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton sold us on the idea that we no longer needed a manufacturing economy in the U.S. because the internet was coming and it would provide entirely new business models.

    Now we’ve seen what that new economy looks like: spying for sale.

    Facebook takes all the information you give them, which they then use to create profiles to sell advertising to people who want your money or your vote.

    Your internet service provider, with former Verizon lawyer and now head of the FCC Ajit Pai having destroyed net neutrality, will soon begin (if they haven’t already started) tracking every single mouse click, reading every email, and checking out every one of your online purchases to get information they can sell for a profit.

    Your “smart" TV is tracking every show you watch, when and for how long and selling that information to marketers and networks.

    And even your credit card company is now selling your information—what have you bought that you’d rather not have the world know?

    To paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech, this is not a real economy at all, in any true sense. It’s a parody of an economy, with a small number of winners and all the rest of us as losers/suckers/“product.”

    While it’s true that Facebook’s malignant business model may well provide a huge opportunity for a competitor to offer a “$3 a month and we don’t track you, spy on you, or sell your data” plan (or even for Facebook to shift to that), it still fails to address the importance of privacy in the context of society and law/rule-making.

    We cannot trust corporations in America with our personal information, as long as that information can make them more and more money. Even your doctor or hospital will now require you sign a form allowing them to sell your information to third parties.

    It’s been decades since we’ve had a conversation in America about privacy. What does the word mean? How should it be applied?

    Just this simple transparency requirement would solve a lot of these problems.

    Business, of course, will scream that they can’t afford compliance with such an onerous requirement. Every time they sell the fact that you love dogs but have a cat allergy and buy anti-allergy medications, they’ll only make a few cents per sale, but it’ll cost them more than that to let you know what part of you and your collective body of information they sold to the allergy medicine manufacturers.

    And that may well be true. It will decrease the profitability of companies like Facebook whose primary business model is spy-and-sell, and will incrementally reduce the revenue to medical groups, credit card companies, and websites/ISPs who make money on the side doing spy-and-sell.

    #Facebook #Médias_sociaux #Vie_privée #Economie_influence

  • FCC votes to repeal net neutrality rules, a milestone for Republican deregulation push - LA Times
    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-net-neutrality-fcc-20171214-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter
    http://www.trbimg.com/img-5a33280f/turbine/la-fi-net-neutrality-fcc-20171214

    “As a result of today’s misguided action, our broadband providers will get extraordinary new powers,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats on the five-member FCC who voted against the repeal.

    “They will have the power to block websites, the power to throttle services and the power to censor online content,” she said. “They will have the right to discriminate and favor the internet traffic of those companies with whom they have a pay-for-play arrangement and the right to consign all others to a slow and bumpy road.”
    Protestors Rally At FCC Against Repeal Of Net Neutrality Rules
    Demonstrators rally outside the Federal Communication Commission building Thursday to protest the repeal of net nutrality rules. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

    The FCC’s net neutrality rules prohibited AT&T Inc., Charter Communications Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and other broadband and wireless internet service providers from selling faster delivery of certain data, slowing speeds for specific video streams and other content, and blocking or otherwise discriminating against any legal online material.

    To enforce the rules, the FCC classified broadband as a more highly regulated utility-like service under Title 2 of federal telecommunications law.

    Telecom companies praised the repeal, while saying they are committed to the principles of net neutrality and have no plans to change their practices.

    The FCC vote “does not mark the ‘end of the Internet as we know it;’ rather it heralds in a new era of light regulation that will benefit consumers,” said David L. Cohen, Comcast’s senior executive vice president.

    But the companies have hedged on whether they would start charging additional fees to transport video streams or other content at a higher speed through their network in a practice known as paid prioritization.

    Pai has said paid prioritization could accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles and home health monitoring, which would need reliably fast service.

    But net neutrality supporters worry telecom companies will set up toll lanes on the internet, cutting deals with some websites to deliver their content faster and squeezing out start-ups and small companies that lack the money to pay for faster service.

    #Neutralité_internet

  • AOL Instant Messenger Made Social Media What It Is Today - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609769/aol-instant-messenger-made-social-media-what-it-is-today

    First released in 1997, AIM was a popular way for millions of people to communicate throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it helped form Internet culture and communication as we know them today. It’s where so many of us became fluent in LOL-ing and emoticons, and caught the itch to stay in constant contact with others no matter where we are.

    But in the two decades since its launch, AIM’s popularity has dwindled in favor of mobile-focused platforms for communicating, like Facebook, Instagram, and Slack. At its peak in 2001, AIM had 36 million active users; as of this summer, it had just 500,000 unique visitors a month. And so, in early October, Verizon-owned Oath (which comprises AIM’s creator, AOL, and Yahoo) announced that on December 15 it would take this giant of the early Internet offline.

    Back in February 1997, Barry Appelman, an AOL engineer, was granted a patent for something opaquely called “User definable on-line co-user lists.” It promised to be “a real time notification system that tracks, for each user, the logon status of selected co-users of an on-line or network system and displays that information in real time.” In plain English, that’s what we came to know as the Buddy List—a then-revolutionary feature that showed you your online friends and indicated whether or not they were actively at their computers.

    “AOL Instant Messenger was a defining part of my childhood,” he [Mark Zuckerberg] wrote. “It helped me understand internet communication intuitively and emotionally in a way that people just a few years older may have only considered intellectually.”

    It’s hard to imagine that the success of messaging apps, ranging from the work-oriented Slack to the ephemeral Snapchat, would’ve been possible had AIM not been so popular. AIM wasn’t the first instant messaging tool to exist, but it was the most widely used and influential in broad strokes, making it possible for us to feel at home in lots of different online settings.

    #AIM #Histoire_internet #Messagerie_instantanée

  • What Will Really Happen if the FCC Abandons Net Neutrality ?
    http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/net-neutrality-debate

    Article intéressant parce qu’il donne la parole aux opposants à la neutralité. Mais à trop vouloir jouer au centre, on finit par prendre le point de vue des dominants.

    Supporters often link net neutrality to free speech and unfettered, equal access to the internet. They also want stricter rules to curb the conduct of ISPs. “Removal of the net neutrality rules could entirely take down the internet as a free and open source of information,” said Jennifer Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. “It’s going to be more corporate control over the content we see … potentially not just favoring things that benefit [ISPs] financially but favoring them politically.”

    But critics say that too much regulation dampens innovation and investments in the internet, which has thrived for decades without formal net neutrality rules. For example, net neutrality would tamp down on innovations such as T-Mobile’s “Binge On” service, which lets customers stream video from Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and other sites without counting it against their data buckets, said Christopher Yoo, professor of law, communication and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, on the radio show. Moreover, the order brings back the FTC as the antitrust enforcer of ISP behavior, protecting consumer interests and banning deceptive business practices. (Listen to a podcast of the radio show featuring Yoo and Golbeck using the player above.)

    As providers of information services, ISPs were much more lightly regulated than telecommunications services — such as the old Ma Bell. However, the FCC did adopt policies to preserve free internet access and usage and curb abuses. In 2004, FCC Chairman Michael Powell under President George W. Bush set out four principles of internet freedom: the freedom to access lawful content, use applications, attach personal devices to the network and obtain service plan information.

    In 2010, under Obama’s first FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, the agency’s Open Internet Order adopted anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules after finding out that Comcast throttled BitTorrent, a bandwidth-intensive, peer-to-peer site where users shared files of TV shows, movies or other content. Faulhaber says Comcast made the mistake of “targeting a particular upstream company. That you can’t do. If you want to control traffic, you have to do it in a much less discriminatory way.”

    But the 2010 order, which also required ISPs to disclose their network management practices, performance and commercial terms, was vacated by a federal court in 2014 after Verizon sued the FCC. The court said the FCC did not have the authority to act because ISPs are not regulated like common telephone carriers.

    This ruling led to the 2015 order by Wheeler that reclassified ISPs like landline phone companies, giving the agency the power to regulate many things, including prices set by broadband providers, although this was set aside. The order also specified the no-blocking and no-discrimination of traffic, and banned paid prioritization, which would give faster internet lanes to companies that pay for it. And it crafted internet conduct standards that ISPs must follow. Last year, an appellate court upheld this order.

    The current proposal by Pai rolls back Wheeler’s order, and more. It classifies ISPs back under information services. It allows paid prioritization. It also punts the policing of any ISP blocking and discriminatory behavior to the FTC to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. It dismantles Wheeler’s internet conduct standards because they are “vague and expansive.” But the proposed order does adopt transparency rules, requiring ISPs to disclose information about their practices to the FCC and the public.

    For ISPs, the issue is not so much net neutrality as it is about Title II. “All of the major ISPs like Comcast and AT&T are on the record saying that they support the idea of net neutrality, but they just oppose the legal classification of broadband as a regulated telecommunications service,” Werbach says. “I wouldn’t expect to see any dramatic changes in the companies’ practices near term. They’re going to wait and see how this all plays out, and they’re also not going to do something that will provoke significant backlash and pressure for more regulation.”

    During her radio show appearance, Golbeck noted that the danger of fast lanes is that smaller websites that cannot afford to pay the ISP could be left behind. Research shows that “even delays of less than a second in serving up content [will make people] bail from your site and go someplace else.” Conversely, she said, if ISPs speed up access to popular sites like Amazon and Netflix because they pay, “it inhibits the ability for other new startup sites to compete.”

    #Neutralité_internet

  • The 265 members of Congress who sold you out to ISPs, and how much it cost to buy them
    https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp-web-browsing-privacy-fire-sale

    They betrayed you for chump change Republicans in Congress just voted to reverse a landmark FCC privacy rule that opens the door for ISPs to sell customer data. Lawmakers provided no credible reason for this being in the interest of Americans, except for vague platitudes about “consumer choice” and “free markets,” as if consumers at the mercy of their local internet monopoly are craving to have their web history quietly sold to marketers and any other third party willing to pay. The only (...)

    #Comcast #Verizon #AT&T #données #lobbying #profiling #FCC

    ##AT&T

  • The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death. - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/technology/internet-dying-repeal-net-neutrality.html

    Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life. When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.

    If this sounds alarmist, consider that the state of digital competition is already pretty sorry. As I’ve argued regularly, much of the tech industry is at risk of getting swallowed by giants. Today’s internet is lousy with gatekeepers, tollbooths and monopolists.

    The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.

    Together these giants have carved the internet into a historically profitable system of fiefs. They have turned a network whose very promise was endless innovation into one stuck in mud, where every start-up is at the tender mercy of some of the largest corporations on the planet.

    This was not the way the internet was supposed to go. At its deepest technical level, the internet was designed to avoid the central points of control that now command it. The technical scheme arose from an even deeper philosophy. The designers of the internet understood that communications networks gain new powers through their end nodes — that is, through the new devices and services that plug into the network, rather than the computers that manage traffic on the network. This is known as the “end-to-end” principle of network design, and it basically explains why the internet led to so many more innovations than the centralized networks that came before it, such as the old telephone network.

    But if flexibility was the early internet’s promise, it was soon imperiled. In 2003, Tim Wu, a law professor now at Columbia Law School (he’s also a contributor to The New York Times), saw signs of impending corporate control over the growing internet. Broadband companies that were investing great sums to roll out faster and faster internet service to Americans were becoming wary of running an anything-goes network.

    To Mr. Wu, the broadband monopolies looked like a threat to the end-to-end idea that had powered the internet. In a legal journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the internet’s equal-opportunity design — and hence was born “net neutrality.”

    Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges and resurrections, some form of net neutrality has been the governing regime on the internet since 2005. The new F.C.C. order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.

    But look, you might say: Despite the hand-wringing, the internet has kept on trucking. Start-ups are still getting funded and going public. Crazy new things still sometimes get invented and defy all expectations; Bitcoin, which is as Wild West as they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.

    Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.

    It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.

    #Neutralité_internet #Vectorialisme

  • 1000 bonnes raisons en une pour quitter Yahoo mail, à moins d’adorer partout étaler ses donnés privées.

    Cher utilisateur Yahoo,

    Sachez que, Yahoo fait désormais partie de Oath, société de médias numériques et mobiles regroupant plus de 50 marques à travers le monde (AOL, HuffPost, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, Makers, etc.) et membre de la famille d’entreprises Verizon qui cherche à façonner l’avenir des médias. L’objectif d’Oath est de créer une communauté d’utilisateurs passionnés et engagés en concevant des contenus et des produits sources d’inspiration et de divertissement.

    Dans le cadre de notre mission et à compter du 18 septembre 2017, nous prévoyons de partager des informations utilisateur avec Oath et la famille d’entreprises Verizon. Nous partagerons ces informations à des fins d’intégration des entreprises et pour que la nouvelle organisation Oath, y compris ces entreprises, puisse les utiliser afin de vous proposer des publicités plus personnalisées, des contenus engageants, des produits innovants, et également à d’autres fins d’analyse, conformément aux politiques relatives à la vie privée de ces entreprises. Yahoo peut également recevoir des données semblables de la part d’entités Oath et Verizon.

    Les informations utilisateur que nous pouvons partager avec Oath et la famille d’entreprises Verizon sont du même type que celles utilisées précédemment par Yahoo pour fournir des produits et services leaders du secteur. Il s’agit notamment d’informations sur votre compte telles que vos informations d’enregistrement (votre nom, votre adresse mail et votre âge, par exemple), vos centres d’intérêt, les types de services que vous utilisez, les cookies et les identifiants d’appareils, les adresses IP, les informations de localisation, ainsi que votre activité sur tous nos sites, logiciels et autres services, et d’autres informations vous concernant que nous collectons conformément à notre Politique relative à la vie privée.

    Votre vie privée est importante pour nous. [<insert evil laugther>] Aucun changement n’a été apporté à la façon dont Yahoo et Oath protègent vos informations personnelles, ainsi qu’aux données que nous partageons avec des tiers ne faisant pas partie de Oath et la famille d’entreprises Verizon. Yahoo EMEA Conditions Générales d’Utilisation et Politique relative à la vie privée s’appliquent toujours à votre activité sur un site Yahoo, votre utilisation d’une application Yahoo ou votre interaction avec nos produits, services ou technologies. L’intégration de Yahoo dans la nouvelle organisation Oath est actuellement en cours. Pendant cette période de transition, nous gérerons vos données avec soin et nous vous informerons, conformément à la Politique relative à la vie privée de Yahoo EMEA dès que d’autres changements notables seront apportés.

    Pour en savoir plus sur les informations que nous pouvons partager, ainsi que sur les préférences de gestion des informations qui sont à votre disposition, veuillez consulter la FAQ.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odK20vQB-7o

    FAQ : https://policies.yahoo.com/ie/fr/yahoo/privacy/euoathnoticefaq

    PS : il va de soi que les liens dans le mail contiennent le nécessaire pour qu’ils puissent savoir que vous avez cliqué dessus...

  • Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/americans-are-dying-younger-saving-corporations-billions

    In 2015, the American death rate—the age-adjusted share of Americans dying—rose slightly for the first time since 1999. And over the last two years, at least 12 large companies, from Verizon to General Motors, have said recent slips in mortality improvement have led them to reduce their estimates for how much they could owe retirees by upward of a combined $9.7 billion, according to a Bloomberg analysis of company filings. “Revised assumptions indicating a shortened longevity,” for instance, led Lockheed Martin to adjust its estimated retirement obligations downward by a total of about $1.6 billion for 2015 and 2016, it said in its most recent annual report.

    Mortality trends are only a small piece of the calculation companies make when estimating what they’ll owe retirees, and indeed, other factors actually led Lockheed’s pension obligations to rise last year. Variables such as asset returns, salary levels, and health care costs can cause big swings in what companies expect to pay retirees. The fact that people are dying slightly younger won’t cure corporate America’s pension woes—but the fact that companies are taking it into account shows just how serious the shift in America’s mortality trends is.

    [...]

    Absent a war or an epidemic, it’s unusual and alarming for life expectancies in developed countries to stop improving, let alone to worsen. “Mortality is sort of the tip of the iceberg,” says Laudan Aron, a demographer and senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “It really is a reflection of a lot of underlying conditions of life.” The falling trajectory of American life expectancies, especially when compared to those in some other wealthy countries, should be “as urgent a national issue as any other that’s on our national agenda,” she says.

    #espérance_de_vie #mortalité #Etats-Unis #pays_développés #retraites

  • Spotify, Google, Tons of Other Companies Will Protest to Save Net Neutrality - Motherboard
    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xa84k/spotify-google-tons-of-other-companies-will-protest-to-save-new-ne

    The protest is organized by Fight for the Future, freepress, and Demand Progress. It’s set to happen five days before the first deadline for comments on the FCC’s proposal to remove the classification of broadband as a telecommunications service. It’s part of FCC chief and former Verizon executive Ajit Pai’s attempt to destroy what protects the internet from fast lanes and discrimination by monolithic internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

    #neutralité_internet

  • En 20 minutes, John Oliver va vous faire comprendre (et aimer) la neutralité du Net
    https://usbeketrica.com/article/en-20-minutes-john-oliver-va-vous-faire-comprendre-et-aimer-la-neutrali

    Dans cette nouvelle vidéo, l’animateur précise d’entrée que le concept est de nouveau au coeur des débats aux Etats-Unis. Si des mesures de protection ont été prises sous l’administration Obama, celle de Trump a décidé d’attaquer frontalement la neutralité du Net, comme nous le soulignions il y a quelques semaines.

    .../...

    L’équipe de John Oliver n’hésite pas à faire un sort à Ajit Pai, le nouveau patron du régulateur américain des télécoms, la Federal Communications Commission (FCC), qui a récemment déclaré que « les jours de la neutralité du Net étaient comptés » . Sous les dehors bonhommes du nouveau patron du gendarme des télécoms US se cache en effet un ancien avocat de Verizon (l’un des plus gros FAI américain), qui se fait le héraut d’une absence totale de régulation dans le secteur qu’il est censé réguler.

    .../...

    L’appel de l’animateur est clair : « tous les groupes qui font Internet doivent s’allier : les gamers, les youtubeurs, les mannequins d’Instagram, Tom de Myspace. On a besoin de vous tous, même des fans de Trump sur 4chan et Reddit. Et ne me dites pas que vous n’avez pas le temps de le faire : si Internet est bien la preuve de quelque chose, c’est que nous avons bien trop de temps à notre disposition ».

    #internet

  • Marissa Mayer , CEO de Yahoo !, sa carrière résumée en une page. (c’est comme ça que je perçois l’article).
    Mon partage n’est pas une ode au capitalisme, plus, un intérêt pour une personne déconsidérée en plein cœur de l’économie de marché. Elle n’est sûrement pas à plaindre.
    En plus, un article du monde, d’habitude, je partage avec des pincettes (sur le nez). Mais la rubrique Pixel semble mieux travaillée.


    http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2017/04/28/le-lent-declin-de-la-toute-puissante-patronne-de-yahoo_5119598_4408996.html
    Extrait à ma sauce :

    Elle a étudié la psychologie cognitive. Elle arrive chez Google en 1999 comme la vingtième employée de l’entreprise, nommée responsable de la page d’accueil. Marissa Mayer participe à de très nombreux projets-clefs, dont la création d’AdWords, Gmail, Google Maps.
    À partir de 2010, lorsque Larry Page reprend le poste de PDG, Marissa Mayer, perd une partie de son pouvoir et est partiellement écartée des grandes décisions stratégiques.
    En juillet 2012, elle quitte Google pour diriger Yahoo ! dans une situation catastrophique. Elle met en place une vaste réorganisation. Alors que les actionnaires la pressent de licencier des milliers d’employés pour redresser les comptes, elle les convainc de lancer plutôt de nouveaux projets.
    Elle met en place un nouveau système d’évaluation des performances des salariés, censé les rendre plus productifs et pousser vers la sortie les moins impliqués, baptisé « Quarterly Performance Reviews ». Structurellement injuste, le système bloque l’avancement et les augmentations des employés, est critiqué à la fois par les salariés du bas de l’échelle et par les managers.
    Les révélations d’Edward Snowden sur l’espionnage de masse de la NSA révèlent que l’agence américaine espionne les données des utilisateurs de Yahoo !
    Le magazine Fortune, qui l’a placée plusieurs années dans son classement des plus puissants patrons au monde, la fait passer en 2016 dans sa liste des chefs d’entreprise les plus décevants.
    Les départs de personnes clefs se multiplient chez Yahoo !
    Elle part avec un parachute doré de 190 millions de dollars.

    #people #femmes #historicisation #silicon_valley

    • Commentaire trouvé dans la suite de l’article :

      La valeur boursière de Yahoo a été multipliée par 3 depuis son arrivée. Passant de 15 milliards à 45 milliards de dollars. Pas si mal pour quelqu’un qui a échoué .

      Les $190 Millions ne sont pas un cheque fait par Yahoo mais le benefice qu’elle tirera de la vente de ses actions.

      C’est vrai que l’article prend un ton d’échec ? Je ne l’ai pas lu ainsi.

    • J’inclus l’article complet si jamais il venait à cacher derrière un #paywal

      Elle part avec un parachute doré de 190 millions de dollars, mais en quittant Yahoo ! après le rachat de l’entreprise par Verizon, Marissa Mayer a cependant laissé beaucoup de son image. En cinq ans, depuis son arrivée en 2012 à la tête du géant du Web américain, Mme Mayer a multiplié les déceptions.

      Longtemps considérée comme la femme la plus puissante de la Silicon Valley, avec Sheryl Sandberg de Facebook, Marissa Mayer a eu une trajectoire stratosphérique. Née en 1975, elle a étudié la psychologie cognitive et l’informatique à Stanford (Californie), où elle se spécialise dans l’intelligence artificielle avant de rejoindre Google en 1999 comme la vingtième employée de l’entreprise – refusant au passage des offres prestigieuses, dont un poste d’enseignante à Carnegie Mellon (Pennsylvanie).

      Au sein de Google, qui croit à une très grande vitesse au début des années 2000, elle occupe rapidement des postes à responsabilité – elle est notamment nommée responsable de la page d’accueil de Google, à une époque où cette page est non seulement la vitrine mais aussi l’unique produit de ce qui n’est encore qu’un moteur de recherche. Elle a laissé dans l’entreprise l’image d’une travailleuse compulsive, obsessionnelle du détail – elle systématise les « tests A/B », consistant à présenter à deux échantillons de visiteurs des versions légèrement différentes du site pour voir laquelle est la plus efficace. Sous la direction de Marissa Mayer, chaque élément de la spartiate page d’accueil de Google est testé, depuis les nuances de couleur du logo jusqu’à la taille des éléments, au pixel près.

      Chez Google, Marissa Mayer participe à de très nombreux projets-clefs, dont la création d’AdWords, celles de Gmail, Google Maps ou encore Google News, tout en enseignant à temps partiel à Stanford. Nommée vice-présidente à la recherche et à l’expérience utilisateur en 2005, elle fait partie des « poids lourds » de l’entreprise, a l’oreille des deux fondateurs de Google (Larry Page et Sergueï Brin), et tout semble lui réussir.

      Mais à partir de 2010, lorsque Larry Page reprend le poste de PDG détenu par Eric Schmidt, les équilibres politiques se modifient : Marissa Mayer, qui a aussi son lot de critiques en interne, change de titre, perd une partie de son pouvoir, et est partiellement écartée des grandes décisions stratégiques.

      La sauveuse annoncée de Yahoo !

      En juillet 2012, elle quitte Google pour diriger Yahoo !, qui est à l’époque au creux de la vague ; l’entreprise, longtemps leader, est dans une situation catastrophique. Marissa Mayer est chargée de la redresser, et pour ce faire, elle lance un grand plan ambitieux, qui commence par la revente d’une partie de la participation de Yahoo ! dans le groupe de vente en ligne chinois Alibaba, en plein essor. L’argent dégagé lui permet de lancer une série d’acquisitions spectaculaires, dont Tumblr en 2013, la plate-forme de microblogs qui connaît alors un succès spectaculaire – mais que Yahoo ! a dû payer au prix fort, 1,1 milliard de dollars, et dont la valorisation est aujourd’hui estimée à 700 millions de dollars.

      En parallèle, elle met en place une vaste réorganisation de Yahoo !. Alors que les actionnaires la pressent de licencier des milliers d’employés pour redresser les comptes, elle les convainc de lancer plutôt de nouveaux projets, et s’engage à trouver d’autres sources d’économies. Elle instaure un système de vote interne, qui permet aux employés de soumettre des questions à la direction, organise de rencontres régulières sur le campus de l’entreprise… Surtout, elle met en place un nouveau système d’évaluation des performances des salariés, censé les rendre plus productifs et pousser vers la sortie les moins impliqués.

      Baptisé « Quarterly Performance Reviews », le système, inspiré de celui en vigueur à Google, est particulièrement byzantin : tous les managers doivent noter, chaque trimestre, tous leurs subordonnés, mais ils doivent le faire en respectant des pourcentages de notes. En pratique, seuls 10 % des employés d’une équipe peuvent obtenir la meilleure note, et 5 % de chaque équipe doit recevoir la pire notation. Structurellement injuste, notamment dans les plus petites équipes, le système bloque l’avancement et les augmentations des employés, est critiqué à la fois par les salariés du bas de l’échelle et par les managers, et provoque en 2013 une vaste fronde au moment où l’entreprise a pourtant réussi à redevenir « cool » depuis l’extérieur.

      S’y ajoutent de vives critiques contre l’interdiction, instaurée par Marissa Mayer, du télétravail, qui pénalise principalement les femmes ; le recrutement de plusieurs anciens « googlers », perçu comme du favoritisme ; et des procès pour licenciements abusifs intentés par d’ex-employés mis à la porte par la nouvelle direction.
      Piratages, problèmes juridiques…

      En un an, Marissa Mayer, accueillie en sauveuse par Yahoo !, est confrontée à des difficultés importantes en interne, tandis que Yahoo ! ne parvient pas à redresser la barre sur le plan financier. Les problèmes s’enchaînent aussi pour l’entreprise sur le plan de la vie privée des utilisateurs : les révélations d’Edward Snowden sur l’espionnage de masse de la NSA révèlent que l’agence américaine espionne les données des utilisateurs de Yahoo !, qui dément toute coopération.

      Plusieurs autres scandales se succèdent. En 2014, l’entreprise est victime d’un piratage de masse, concernant les données personnelles de près d’un milliard d’utilisateurs : c’est le plus important vol de données de l’histoire, qui ne sera rendu public que deux ans plus tard – et dont l’annonce viendra plomber les négociations de rachat par Verizon, qui obtiendra un rabais substantiel dans les discussions. Un autre revers majeur pour Marissa Mayer intervient en 2015, lorsque des incertitudes juridiques conduisent à l’abandon du projet de scission de la participation dans Alibaba, un projet majeur ardemment défendu par la PDG de Yahoo !.

      Marissa Mayer a finalement suivi la longue descente aux enfers de Yahoo !, alors que l’entreprise continue de perdre des parts de marché. Le magazine Fortune, qui l’a placée plusieurs années dans son classement des plus puissants patrons au monde, la fait passer en 2016 dans sa liste des chefs d’entreprise les plus décevants – au dernier trimestre 2015, son entreprise a perdu la somme astronomique de 4,4 milliards de dollars.

      Les départs de personnes clefs se multiplient chez Yahoo ! – dont celui du responsable de la sécurité du groupe, le très respecté Alex Stamos, à qui Marissa Mayer avait caché un accord secret avec le gouvernement américain pour détecter en temps réel des mots-clefs dans les e-mails des utilisateurs de Yahoo !.

      Malgré ces multiples échecs, avant que son départ de Yahoo ! ne soit officialisé, Marissa Mayer avait laissé entendre à plusieurs reprises qu’elle souhaitait continuer à diriger l’entreprise après son rapprochement avec AOL, décidé par Verizon. Mais cette option était jugée très peu crédible par tous les observateurs.

      L’article dit aussi de lire :
      http://siliconvalley.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/04/28/marissa-mayer-va-quitter-yahoo-avec-190-millions-de-dolla
      http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2017/03/15/yahoo-quatre-inculpations-prevues-dans-le-cadre-de-la-cyberattaque-de-2014_5
      http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2017/02/16/de-faux-cookies-ont-ete-utilises-pour-pirater-des-comptes-e-mail-yahoo_50805

    • Elle n’hérite que d’une seul livre et un brûlot
      Olivier Wurlod, « La patronne de Yahoo ! déçoit de plus en plus » , 24 heures,‎ 24 avril 2015, p. 13 (ISSN 1661-2256)
      Moi qui pensait trouver une autobiographie ou un bouquin de techniques cognitives.
      En fait, il y en a plein en anglais. Bizarre qu’ils n’apparaissent pas sur Wikipédia Fr.

    • Pour ta question d’il y a 3 mois : « C’est vrai que l’article prend un ton d’échec ? Je ne l’ai pas lu ainsi. »
      Le titre de l’article que tu linkais est quant même très dépréciatifs :

      Le lent déclin de la toute-puissante patronne de Yahoo !

      Marissa Mayer, intellectuelle brillante, passée par les plus hautes responsabilités à Google, a enchaîné échecs et mauvaises décisions à la tête de Yahoo !.

      Même si le contenu n’est pas conforme au titre (et le contenu détail pas mal de problèmes) et que le titre et l’accroche n’est pas fait par les mêmes personnes que le contenu de l’article, le résultat est que l’impression général qui se dégage est à base de « déclin, échecs et mauvaises décisions »

      Après ce qui est bon ou pas change selon les point de vue, pour les actionnaires ca semble de bonnes décisions, si comme le dit le commentaire que tu relève il y a un triplement de la valeur boursière.
      Si on parle de bonnes décisions du point de vue sociale, ca m’étonnerais qu’on puisse tripler la valeur en bourse de Yahoo dans faire des choses nuisibles aux populations du style évasion fiscale et ce genre de choses.